Gender and Science

The boys down the street had Giant Killer Robotz™. They went to the same school as Kylie, and got off at the same bus stop. Her mother always told her to try and get along with them, because Kylie had no one else to talk to when she was shooed out of the house to go 'play outside.' They were okay, but they were boys, and sometimes boys didn't quite get it.

Like the sometimes when they didn't let her play with them. They always had their reasons, she didn't have the right toy, she was wearing the wrong color, they only needed three people... but she knew the real reason they didn't let her play.

The day they all had Giant Killer Robotz™ was one of those days.

"How can you play with us if you don't have a robot?" Michael asked in that philosophical way he had, and pushed the glasses up his nose because the sweat was making them slide off.

"No one told me that it we needed robots today." Kylie looked at the three boys with their three robots. The robots were only two feet tall, and didn't look very giant to her. Maybe the standards for Giant Killer Robotz™ were different, and no one had told her that, either.

David looked at Billy.

Billy chewed on his lower lip and squinted up at her. "No one has to tell you about robots," he told her.

"Oh," Kylie said, realizing that he was right. Everyone should know about robots.

She didn't get to play with the boys that day. It was her fault that she didn't know about the robots, after all.

"Mom, I need a Giant Killer Robot."

"You know I don't like that kind of play," her mother told her. Her mother normally said that kind of thing, whether Kylie wanted a Dress Me Up™ doll or a Deathzone Frontier Battlesaur™. There would be no changing her mind, no matter how much Kylie asked, pleaded, or asked her father. That much she had learned from painful trial and error.

Kylie decided that this simply wouldn't do.

So she stayed up late one night and made a plan, and stayed up late the next night to set that plan in motion.

“I can’t believe this” Maude muttered into the glove compartment as she fished out her insurance and registration.

A minute ago the car ahead of her had slammed on its breaks to avoid colliding with the Hummer that had barreled out of the gas station. Maude tried to turn onto the shoulder but there wasn’t enough time. Her car crashed into the other with a nice, loud crunch. She had bit her lip in her moment of panic and could taste the blood.

I haven't written a poem (where anyone could read it) in almost ten years. I was, therefore, a little afraid because I had volunteered to write poetry for this paper assignment. I tried several different things, and they were all pretty crummy. Words that sounded great and made sense in my head looked silly on paper and came out wrong when I read them back to myself. I think I was forcing meaning, rather than naturally making it or just letting it happen. Then I remembered the joke I'd made in class on Wednesday - that a single haiku wouldn't exactly equate to five pages of writing.

That was, perhaps, untrue. I also remembered what Anne had said in reply, that a haiku filled with words of the right weight could in that sense perfectly fit the bill. All this remembering happened as I was walking across campus, and simultaneously thinking about how I'm really going to miss the weeping cherry trees when I graduate.

(The spacing got really messed up while i tried to post)... 

The aim of my project was to give a more modernized perspective of the three waves of feminism and how they would view science. I have tried to incorporate more than physics in my poetry, even though we have focused much more on physics than any other science. Though my poetry is not a direct representation of any of the feminist critics from whom we have read, I tried to put more of my own perspective—or rather, what I got from these critiques.

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I am searching for a name… this sound I used to know… They all remind me that I am real, that we are here… Hear them tell me, don’t you? I am searching for a name… the one I used to claim… before I became… so many. I always know the perfect fit… that’s why the others always came to me… for answers…they still try, but I won’t. Can’t. We won’t let me. That is when the memory died… when night after night more of them began to cry and fill my eyes so I could not see anything ahead but everything elsewhere instead… I am searching for a name…trying to remember that time when we were an am. Before I felt them inside… when we were me… We feel the world around us, beyond these four white walls…Everything’s connected, you know…it’s just molecules. The wall, me, we… us all.

*put titles of poems in quotations ("W", "Schrodinger's cat said meow and died", "Oedipa") because serendip was not allowing underlining or proper spacing.

"W"

Yes, the letter on my chest is W.

And no, I prefer not to be seen that way.

Feminist critiques of science have largely focused their efforts upon reforming the ways in which scientists practice science via pedagogy and research, in which scientific communities are organized and in which science conceptualizes the natural world. I wish to question the ways in which science is used in public discourse by non-scientists. I argue that just as feminist critiques argue that scientific inquiry must be socially responsible, discourse on social concerns must be equally responsible for their use and understanding of scientific knowledge and explain the ways in which Karen Barad's ideas on scientific pedagogy would reinforce both arenas. I take as a case study, Lisa Belkin's October 2003 New York Times article, “The Opt-out Revolution.”

Language is one of the most nuanced tools we, as human beings, have at our disposal, but it can also be one of the clumsiest. In a world where context means everything and when one word with a clear definition but an ambiguous connotation can change how the reader interprets your statement, word choice is paramount and virtually an art form.

So the use of the word “agency” as it is perceived in the scientific community can be a little problematic at times. Common understanding of the word is “a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved”1 or “working as a means to an end; instrumentality, intermediation.”2

Paper 3: What use can you make of the feminist critique of science?

There Isn’t Just One

Dear Journal,

            So, I’m supposed to write about the feminist critique of science, drawing from my experiences in my Gender and Science class and from the readings that we had been assigned. It’s weird to think of a single feminist critique of science, or the structure of science as it has been institutionalized. From the words of Caryn Musil, who is one of the authors, whose works we read in class,

Changing the Classroom

Using The Feminist Critique of Science

A feminist walks into the principal’s office at her local elementary school, and slaps down on the desk a thick packet.